The boxship quite certainly had lights. Even if she didn't, you'd think a radar-equipped war canoe might have spotted a ferkin great big boxship on primary radar as well as the secondary paint on AIS (maritime equivalent of ADS-B).

The warship is bloody lucky that the freighter had the wit to spin the wheel to Stbd at the last moment.

If she'd fully T-boned the Fitzgerald with her stem she might easily have buckled the warship's keel-beam which probably would have been a write-off job.

F=MA and 39,000 tonnes at 17kts, spread over just two or three metres is a hell of a lot of M at a lot of A over a very small area. A bit like taking a felling axe to a car's side-pillar, only hundreds of thousands of times worse.

A multi-million dollar warship substantially damaged while a containor ship loses a bit of paint. WTF?

Hardly surprising when you consider the relative sizes of the ships. There are echoes here of the sinking of the light cruiser HMS Curacao which was cut in half when struck amidships by the RMS Queen Mary in 1942. The Queen Mary suffered a bit more than paint loss but was able to continue steaming at more or less full speed, as she was under orders not to stop because of the threat of U Boats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Curacoa_(D41)

USS Kinkaid, straits of Malaga, 1989. A good friend of mine was on board..

Quote:

In November 1989, Kinkaid and the Panamanian-registered freighter M/V Kota Petani were involved in a collision in the Strait of Malacca. The collision caused one death and 15 other casualties to the Kinkaid's crew, and US$15 million in damages to Kinkaid. She made Singapore under her own power for temporary repairs, then Subic Bay, Philippines, then San Diego for permanent repairs.